Having been an Edius user for the last 4 years what, in your opinion, makes Vegas Pro a more "complete" package?

Barry, I really don't feel like starting another NLE war; the original poster mentioned some $700 and for that, you can get Vegas Pro which is completely hardware-independent (hence no more expenditures), and contains a DVD/BD authoring software as well.

I've been using Edius as well, and while it shines over Vegas in some departments, it should suffice to say I never completed any project using Edius alone.

William--I've never used the PC edit NLE's, because I'm on a mac, but before sinking your money and your learning curve into Avid, I'd give the other NLE's recommended here by others a try first. I just finished a long-form documentary project with Avid and found it to be on average 25% slower than Final Cut Pro. I'm talking its interface here, not its interaction with the CPU. Avid was the system I first learned on many moons ago, so I was surprised to find this, but when you're repeating thousands of keystrokes a day, it adds up. You may find that one of these other NLE's is more intuitive than Avid, and for speed and creativity, that's what counts.

Avid Media Composer is well over $2000. I thought your price range was $300 to $700?

John

well, I just wanted to try it out. A producer that I work with has V.3.0 and wants to upgrade to 3.5....as we did as test shoot yesterday and for some reason we couldn't get the clip to convert over, as all we got was "no media"...she is going to the sales house today to view a demo of MC 3.5.... and also to look at Final Cut Pro...

You need to copy the footage to your harddrive, creating a scpecific folder to lable and keep your footage in is best. The defualt folder on your cards will always be BPAV so you must create a new folder named whatever you want to help identify your footage and then copy the BPAV folder to it. Once it is on your harddrive you will be fine to edit with... If you try and edit off the cards when you eject a card the footage will go offline... Hope this helps.

I have to come out in favour of Edius. Using the same MacPro, clips and transitions/filters Edius can be up to six times faster than FCP in rendering and its real time performance with full quality video monitoring is much better. I have also tried PP2 and Vegas 7 on the same machine with slower rendering and real time performance. For PP you will need to add the Matrox hardware to get anything like the real time performance of Edius. However, Edius does lack in some areas such as alpha channel support and audio. The latest version that is due out in May will support direct Bluray creation from the time line.

Are there any third party reviews of these edit software packages giving the pros and cons of each?
What one person finds a must have another person might not need at all. A particlular bottleneck on a program might not be an issue to me, another might be a big issue.

Barry, I really don't feel like starting another NLE war; the original poster mentioned some $700 and for that, you can get Vegas Pro which is completely hardware-independent (hence no more expenditures), and contains a DVD/BD authoring software as well.

I've been using Edius as well, and while it shines over Vegas in some departments, it should suffice to say I never completed any project using Edius alone.

All my recent commercial DVD/BD's have been completed in Vegas.

I don't want a war either, I don't think we have to have one.

As a Vegas Pro user, I would like to know what departments Edius shines over Vegas in. To me Vegas does seem very targeted for EX1/EX3/XDCAM users, native editing/smart rendering of mxf files being one I'm particularly fond of. The included DVD Architect program is another compelling feature for its very good Blu-ray authoring talents and outstanding quality (although slow) AVC h.264 encoder. Of particular appeal to me, is the Vegas multi-channel audio, which gives complete control over the creation of discrete 5.1 Dolby surround tracks, with filter set and it's fully Blu-ray compliant.

Many users export Vegas .m2t/mpeg2 using Blu-ray templates which are accepted natively by DVD Architect. Although very fast, I like the resulting quality and file sizes that comes from natively editing/smart rendering the EX1 .mxf files to DVD Architect. Since mxf is not Blu-ray compliant, DVD Architect will have to render those (it does accept mxf for input) to AVC h.264 which is very slow, the AVC h.264 encoder in DVD Architect is better than the one in Vegas quality wise, and can be combined with native AC3 5.1 surround from vegas onto Blu-ray.

Just to come full circle, I run edius 5.01 on my Sony Vaio 2ghz laptop which is slower than 2.4, but heck it really flies. I recently took an entire project (480GB) on a single external usb drive ( all EX1 footage) and my laptop on a trip so as I could keep working on it.

I lashed up an external HD monitor to the laptop via HDMI and it was really cool, I was amazed at how well this little old thing handled what was a pretty complex project.

Not sure I understand you, I edit with it, and encode to whatever format I need as Edius outputs almost everything, including EX1 files back to my camera media ... or out to tape via firewire - whatever.

As a Vegas Pro user, I would like to know what departments Edius shines over Vegas in.

For instance, more consistent, predictable and user-friendly (in fact, transparent to the user) handling of colour space.

But as said, I agree with you. Even though I personally never use MXF smart rendering, as any time savings in Vegas are lost due to DVDA needing to re-compress anyway. Also, I prefer 35 Mbps MPEG-2 over H.264 for my BD's.

You are absolutely correct as far as audio is considered, though; Edius by itself doesn't offer the same capabilities as Vegas does, out of the box.

Piotr, for DVDA to not re-encode the video, Vegas must present it from one of the Blu-ray standard templates. You can of course modify any of the parameters including bit rate, but if you change the bit rate in particular, for example from 25 to 35mbps, DVDA will insist on re-encoding. How are you doing it then? Are you authoring to Blu-ray from the Vegas timeline without menus? Or some other method?

Piotr, for DVDA to not re-encode the video, Vegas must present it from one of the Blu-ray standard templates. You can of course modify any of the parameters including bit rate, but if you change the bit rate in particular, for example from 25 to 35mbps, DVDA will insist on re-encoding. How are you doing it then? Are you authoring to Blu-ray from the Vegas timeline without menus? Or some other method?

Tom, as long as Vegas presents DVDA with the correct file format (the BD templates are of course a good starting point, but may be modified), DVDA will accept (i.e., NOT re-encode) m2v files of up to 40 Mbps.